The Montgomery Murder (9 page)

‘Best do what Alfie tells you.’ Jack, as always, was calm.

‘I’m sick of Alfie’s bossing!’

‘He keeps us all fed and out of the streets, don’t he?’ Jack for once sounded impatient and even angry with his brother. He strode off without another word.

Alfie waited until Tom found a good spot on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and watched as he and Mutsy began doing the tricks that Alfie had practised again and again on the dark evenings in
their cellar. Tom had Mutsy’s big paws in his own two hands and was dancing around singing in his loud, hoarse voice:

‘A ring, a ring of roses,

A pocket full of posies,

Atishoo, Atishoo,

All fall down.’

When Tom said ‘Atishoo’, Mutsy sneezed. That was a trick that Alfie had taught him by tickling his nose with a feather and saying ‘Atishoo’. Soon Mutsy would sneeze as
soon as anyone said ‘Atishoo’.

And then when Tom said ‘All fall down’, both he and Mutsy fell to the ground. The weather was bad, but the few shoppers stopped and watched. One lady sent her servant to bring two
children from a carriage waiting further down the road. As Alfie passed, he heard a chink of coins in the tin basin. There would not be as good a collection as when Sammy sang, but there might be
enough to get supper that night.

Alfie moved away and turned down Monmouth Street. He had decided that his first task was to see Betty. The chances were that she may have been the last person to see Mr Montgomery alive –
the last person, that was, except for the murderer.

Betty and her old grandmother lived in a cellar halfway down the street. Betty begged old clothes from the posh houses in Bloomsbury and then she and her grandmother mended them and sold them in
the market at Cheapside.

Alfie had become friendly with Betty about a year ago. A well-dressed, drunken man had been pestering her. He had his arm in a deadlock around her neck when Alfie and Mutsy came round the corner
from Neal Street. Alfie had instantly given the command, ‘Get him, boy’ to Mutsy, and Mutsy had seized the man by the seat of his trousers and knocked him to the ground. All three of
them fled instantly, Mutsy triumphantly carrying a large piece of good-quality black woollen material in his mouth. Alfie and Mutsy had to lie low for a day or two, but he hadn’t regretted
doing it.

‘If there’s anything I can ever do for you,’ Betty had said, ‘just ask.’

However, when Alfie came to the cellar in Monmouth Street, there was no answer to his knock. He knocked again, but still there was no sound. The one tiny window was firmly shut, but that was not
surprising as damp swirls of fog were everywhere and no one wanted it in their rooms. What was strange, though, was there was no sign of candlelight from the window. On a day like this when the fog
made the morning as dark as evening, Betts and her grandmother would definitely need a candle to do the odd bits of sewing that made the old clothes fit to be sold to the market stallholders.

‘No one there.’ The voice came from the steps next door. The knocking had roused George from the cellar next door. He called himself a shoemaker, but his work consisted in taking old
shoes – stolen, or begged from houses in nearby Bloomsbury – and polishing them up and mending holes, sometimes with just a piece of strong cardboard, then selling them on. Most of the
people who lived in Monmouth Street were engaged in this business of providing footwear and clothing for poor people and making a few shillings for themselves while they were doing it.

‘Where have they gone, George?’ Alfie kept his voice polite. George was a strange fellow, liable to go into fits of rage if anyone contradicted him.

‘And you ain’t the first to be looking for Betty this morning . . . and yesterday, too.’ As usual George didn’t bother answering the question.

‘Oh well, I’d better be off then,’ said Alfie cheerfully. He didn’t look at George again, but went quickly back up the steps, whistling a little tune as he went. When he
reached the railings above George’s cellar, he stopped and bent down and pretended to take a splinter of wood from the heel of his bare foot.

‘You need a pair of shoes.’ George couldn’t resist trying for a sale.

‘How could I afford a pair of shoes?’ Alfie inspected his heel carefully and then rubbed it.

‘Get you a perfect pair for a tanner. Can’t say better than that.’

Alfie made a show of turning out his trouser pockets and showing that they were empty. He didn’t think he’d get much of a pair of shoes for sixpence. They would fall apart after a
few days. George was known to take shoes that were wafer-thin and paint glue over them to give them the strong, shiny appearance of brand new leather. However, he knew that George was bursting with
information, and he had to keep him in good humour.

‘I’m hoping to get a job soon,’ he said. ‘Betty was going to talk to a geezer called Mr Montgomery from Bedford Square, about me helping with his horses. Might be able to
buy a pair of shoes then.’

George laughed hoarsely. ‘You’re a slow boy. That Montgomery gent was croaked — George mimed being choked with a wire ‘— the night before last, just across the road
from here – and guess what? The peelers are looking for Betty. They think that she did it. She was with him that night. I saw her myself.’

And I suppose told the police, too, thought Alfie. ‘She in jail now then, is she?’ He said the words as if he didn’t care.

‘Nah, she hopped it. Gone out of London, probably. The grandmother is from the country. Up Hampstead way. ’

‘No hope of a job for me, then.’ Now Alfie just wanted to be on his way. With a quick wave of his hand to George, he moved on briskly, down Monmouth Street towards Seven Dials.

St Giles, that’s where I’ll look, thought Alfie as he went along the crowded street. Betty would have had more sense than to go to her grandmother’s home village. The police
would pick her up easily there – everyone knew that the country was the wrong place to go if you wanted to get lost. St Giles was a different matter. It was a well-known fact that if a
policeman at St Giles asked a question he would get forty different replies and not a single one of them would be right. By instinct, no one there ever gave a truthful answer to the police.

St Giles was its usual noisy self when Alfie came into the crowded rookeries. He sauntered along for a while – it was a good idea to let the inhabitants have a look at you before venturing
any questions.

‘Betty, from Monmouth Street,’ he said eventually to a woman rescuing her son from a stinking pool of water that had suddenly bubbled up at the centre of one of the courts.

She gave him a long look, taking in his tousled hair, bare feet and shabby clothes, and then nodded in the direction of a tall, falling-down house just behind him.

No more was said, and Alfie did not even acknowledge the information. He strolled over towards the house and climbed the rickety stairs. He had to walk carefully and lightly on the badly sloping
staircase, holding on firmly to the banisters.

At the first landing he met a man, wide-eyed and drunken, stumbling down the stairs.

‘Betty, the clothes girl from Monmouth Street,’ Alfie said briefly. The man hiccoughed and gazed at him with widely open eyes. There was a terrible smell from him, worse than the
smell from the privy.

‘Plump little girl, about seventeen, curly hair,’ added Alfie when there was no reply.

‘Where is she?’ asked the man. His voice was hoarse and thick with alcohol. Alfie ignored the question and looked around to see if there was anyone sober who might give him
information.

But then the man seized him by the arm. ‘Who are you?’ he screamed. ‘Oh my eyes and ears, what devil’s spawn are you? Oh my lungs and liver, I’ll rip you open!
I’ll tear you from limb to limb.’

Crazy, thought Alfie. His heart was thumping, but he had spent the years since his parents died making sure that his feelings did not show on his face, and he looked at the mad man with what he
knew would be a calm, indifferent expression. It seemed to work, as after a minute the man dropped his arm and went clumping down the stairs.

‘You looking for a girl?’ An old woman popped out of a door on the landing. Alfie swallowed twice. He didn’t trust his voice, so he just nodded.

‘You haven’t heard, then?’

He shook his head.

‘A girl fell through the rotten boards in the privy last night. She fell into the cesspool below. She was drowned when they fished her out.’

CHAPTER 15

Alfie looked around the crumbling house, with the crazily leaning staircase, the chunks of rotten plaster dangling from the walls, the broken windows and the missing
floorboards. He shuddered. He had been fond of Betty. She had been kind to the boys from time to time – whenever she had some luck herself.

He returned down the stairs, feeling his heart skip a beat every time that the wood creaked beneath his bare feet. He knew where the privy was: the smell was unmistakable. When he reached the
bottom step he stared down the dimly lit back passageway. The door was askew, swinging on its hinges and, beyond it, from the faint sheen, he guessed that what was left of the floor was underwater.
He turned his face aside at the stench – the smell from the privy in his own place was bad enough, but this was unbearable.

‘Don’t go in there,’ he yelled as a little girl of about four, filthy, and dressed in what looked like the moth-eaten top-half of a woman’s frock, approached the door and
stood hesitating on the threshold, peering in at the flooded floor. ‘Go out in the street,’ he said, trying to sound like someone in authority. If she went in, he was afraid that he
would not have the courage to rescue her.

She looked startled at his shout, burst into tears, but turned and ran out into the street. Alfie heaved a sigh of relief and began to follow her, still treading carefully. It looked to him as
if the whole house had lurched to one side.

He had only taken a step when he saw a door open slightly and then close again. It was enough, though. He had caught a glimpse of a woman’s boa, its originally white feathers filthy and bedraggled. He knew who always wrapped her throat in that thing.

Alfie didn’t hesitate. Immediately he knocked on the door. There was no reply, but he knocked again. ‘It’s just Alfie, Alfie from Bow Street,’ he whispered in through the
keyhole.

There was still no reply, but he sensed that someone was there and waited patiently. A minute later, he heard the sound of the bolt being drawn back, and there was Betty.

‘What do you want?’ she asked in a whisper. Her usually pink cheeks were the colour of chalk and her large blue eyes had heavy shadows under them.

Alfie did not hesitate. In a second he was through the door and shutting it firmly behind him.

‘You all right, Betts?’ he asked.

She shivered, turning even paler, and her eyes looked even bigger than usual.

‘I didn’t kill him, Alfie,’ she said in a whisper.

‘Course you didn’t.’ He made his voice sound reassuring. He didn’t think she had – she didn’t have the nerve. And why should she? Mr Montgomery was worth more
alive than dead to Betty. Anyway,
if
she had garrotted him, she wouldn’t have missed the watch.

‘What time was it when you left him?’ he asked quickly.

‘The bell was being rung at St Giles church,’ she said after a minute’s thought. If she had answered more quickly, Alfie would have guessed that it was a planned answer, but
now he was inclined to think she had answered truthfully. About nine o’clock, then – that was the last service of the day. The body must have lain in the doorway until the police found
it there the following morning. That end of Monmouth Street was St Giles territory, and the people of St Giles minded their own business about murder as well as everything else.

‘And which way did he go? Back towards Bedford Square?’

She frowned and then said, ‘No, he went the other way, down towards Long Acre.’

‘And?’ Alfie could see from her expression that she was holding something back.

‘And nothing.’

‘Go on, Betts, tell me! You can’t stay hidden here for ever. Once the murderer is caught you can go back to Monmouth Street.’ Betty looked unconvinced so Alfie added,
‘I’ve got a few ideas of my own, so who knows, I might be able to catch the fellow that did it. Then you’ll be in the clear, won’t you?’

She smiled then, and a little colour came back to her cheeks. ‘
You
find the murderer?’ she said incredulously.

Alfie nodded. ‘See someone follow him, did you?’ He made his voice sound firm and assured.

Betty nodded. ‘Fellow passed me,’ she said hesitantly.

‘Notice anything about him?’

Betty thought for a moment. ‘He had a funny smell from him,’ she said unexpectedly.

‘A smell!’ Alfie was used to smells. You didn’t smell yourself normally, but sometimes you smelled other people. That drunken man coming down the stairs had smelled so bad that
Alfie had held his breath until he passed.

‘Not a toff, then,’ he said after a minute. Toffs didn’t smell. Toffs had servants to boil up water for them and lug up buckets of it to their bedrooms. Some of them even had
special washing places called bathrooms. Alfie was disappointed that it was not a toff that Betty had seen following Mr Montgomery. If one of the residents of St Giles had killed Mr Montgomery it
would be as much as his life was worth to breathe a hint of it to the police. But then there was the evidence of the turned-out pockets and the watch still sitting in its fob. Alfie still felt sure
that it was a toff that murdered Mr Montgomery.